For three inspired nights in Chicago in 1965, trumpeter Miles Davis presided over some of the most sublime music-making of his career.
It was a few days before Christmas, and Davis, who was born in East St. Louis, Ill., and maintained deep ties to friends and family in Chicago, was playing his annual holiday gig in town, at a Wells Street club called the Plugged Nickel.
The joint, which had all of 10 tables and could hold a standing-room-only crowd of 100, tops, folded years ago, but Davis’ Plugged Nickel performances have achieved the stature of myth ever since that winter of ’65.
To those who heard the sets, the trumpeter’s work with his incendiary quintet of the period was as daring as it was profound, the players stretching beyond recognition many long-honored rules and rites of jazz improvisation.
Fortunately, Columbia Records taped the last two nights of Davis’ engagement in their entirety. But the label waited until 1982 to release a fragment of the material in the United States; five years later, 57 more minutes’ worth was released on a “Cookin’ at the Plugged Nickel” reissue.
Now, 30 years after the historic gigs, four years after Davis’ death, at age 65, and one year after Columbia discovered dozens of long-forgotten Plugged Nickel master tapes in an East Coast warehouse, the world finally is about to hear what really happened on those fabled Chicago nights.
Later this month, Columbia will issue “The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965,” an eight-CD set that contains every note that Davis and friends played on Dec. 22 and 23, 1965, or at least as much of it as is known to exist. (In addition, Mosaic Records, which specializes in historic jazz reissues, later this year will release the same material on 10 LPs.)
An advanced hearing of the complete recordings suggests that the music that Davis’ band created at the Plugged Nickel justifies the legend that has accrued around it, even if the recordings also reveal the flaws and frailties of Davis’ trumpetry. What’s more, the recordings put into new perspective the importance of this chapter in the musical career of the chameleon-like Davis.
The trumpeter himself always treasured the memory of the Plugged Nickel dates, as he indicated in his memoirs, “Miles: The Autobiography” (with Quincy Troupe, Simon & Schuster). Having spent much of 1965 recuperating from two painful hip operations, he was eager to get back on stage.
“It was a great comeback and the people received the music real well,” wrote Davis, referring to his November ’65 date at the Village Vanguard, in New York.
“After that, I went on the road in December to Philly and Chicago, where we played the Plugged Nickel and made a record there. . . . Everybody played like we hadn’t been separated at all. Like I said, I have always believed not playing with each other for a while is good for a band if they are good musicians and like playing with each other.
“It just makes the music fresher, and that’s what happened at the Plugged Nickel, even though we were playing the same book we had always played.”
And therein lies the sweet irony of the Plugged Nickel dates.
Though Davis had begun forming his second great quintet in 1963 (with tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams), and though the band had created a sensation with its intricate, original compositions on such Davis studio albums as “E.S.P.” and “Miles Smiles,” the quintet turned to Davis’ old book of standards for the Plugged Nickel shows.
Davis, according to his memoirs, simply felt that audiences were coming in specifically to hear tunes such as “‘Round Midnight” and “My Funny Valentine,” which had graced his popular earlier studio albums and live recordings alike. So even if Davis’ mid-’60s quintet was developing its radical musical ideas in the recording studio with newer, fresher compositions, Davis stuck to standards at the Plugged Nickel.
As a result, we hear his quintet applying its oft-eccentric, unorthodox methods to vintage tunes. The irony, then, is that there could be no better way to perceive, savor and measure precisely the innovations that Davis and friends were formulating at the time than to hear these innovations applied to songs from an earlier era.
Or, as Davis put it in his memoirs, “Instead of developing the new music live, which we were playing on records, we found ways to make the old music sound as new as the new music we were recording.”
Listen closely to the eight CDs on the “Complete” set and you will hear a new musical language as it is being created and refined. Though Davis clearly was following Ornette Coleman’s lead in pushing past traditional chordal vocabularies, he and his band were doing so with an elegance and a sonic beauty all their own.
That the quintet is recorded in three sets one night and four sets the next makes matters even more interesting, for the listener can hear Davis and friends addressing many of the same tunes repeatedly, each time differently than the last.
The sessions open boldly, with Davis brazenly bending pitches and fracturing traditional phrasings in “If I Were a Bell” and “Stella by Starlight.” The smudged tones, wavering notes, splintered lines and chromatic meanderings of Davis’ solos stretch the limited musical vocabulary of these chestnuts to the breaking point. These harmonically traditional tunes were not written to slip into one key and out another with every bar. The long melody lines were not designed to be broken down into so many brief and sighing phrases.
Yet Davis does precisely that, coaxing the repertoire into a more modern realm.
For all the muted poetry and whispering lyricism of Davis’ playing, however, the trumpeter’s work is not the most arresting feature of these tracks or those that follow. Rather, it’s the ensemble playing–with its textural transparency and palpable sense of wide-open space–that consistently commands attention.
To hear Davis’ ineffably tender lines reflected in Hancock’s crystalline pianism on “Walkin,’ ” Shorter’s elliptical and haunting phrases on “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” Williams’ soft but propulsive brushwork and Carter’s fleet and lithe bass playing throughout is to understand why many listeners consider this band superior to Davis’ first great quintet (with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones).
The delicate sound that the Plugged Nickel quintet could achieve, the driving energy that the rhythm section could produce without disturbing the band’s dynamics, the revolutions in structure and form that these players wrought throughout the 1965 sessions underscore the importance of this band, as it is now heard on the “Complete” recordings.
The solo passages, too, distinguish this ensemble and underscore the historic importance of the Plugged Nickel dates.
Indeed, though Davis deserves full credit for having had the vision to put together this quintet and for giving his players plenty of room in which to explore new ideas, the trumpeter does not stand as the foremost soloist in the band.
Rather, it’s Shorter–with his consistently radiant tone, technical virtuosity, unpredictable starts and stops and utter defiance of predictable harmonic turns–who towers over the rest. The restless and volatile lines he plays on “Agitation” (in the second set of Dec. 22), the ease with which he turns from hard-bop to modal to “free” idioms on “No Blues” (the third set of Dec. 22) are still breathtaking to behold.
For his part, Davis proves capable of both haunting lyric statements and startlingly wrong notes, of flashes of improvisational virtuosity followed by passages of less than clean and controlled playing.
Yet Davis was shrewd enough to share the microphone generously, placing more attention on his ensemble than on himself, perhaps knowing that it was as leader and visionary that he was at his strongest.
That much seems apparent from the many hours of bristling ensemble improvisation that the Plugged Nickel set contains, most unheard until now. For this, Davis fans can thank Columbia executive Steve Berkowitz, who halted the reissue process last year when he was led to believe that extra reels of the Plugged Nickel dates were lurking somewhere in the Manhattan storage space of Sony (which owns Columbia).
” called me and said, `Hey, Steve, there are 25 boxes on this shelf of half-inch multitrack recordings of “Live at the Plugged Nickel,” and these boxes look very old,’ ” recalled Berkowitz in a recent Billboard magazine interview. By sifting through those boxes, Berkowitz “found a lot of things that had been previously edited out, or things that were not known to have existed before.”
Thus, what was to have been a seven-CD set was pushed up to eight. Though there’s no diminishing the import of Davis’ innovations on recordings such as “Birth of the Cool” (Capitol), his orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans on “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain” (Columbia) and so on, perhaps it’s fair to say that Davis put together his most accomplished band with the second quintet.
Certainly it’s not difficult to make that statement with the ethereal and revolutionary sound of the “Plugged Nickel” set still lingering in the ear.
